Sailing on the waves of life

Sailing on the Waves of Life: A Practical Guide to Releasing Control

Sailing on the waves of life is the practice of releasing your grip on outcomes you can’t actually control, and redirecting that energy toward being fully present in the moment. It’s recognizing when you’re reaching for “control strategies” to manufacture a feeling of safety, and instead finding ways to feel genuinely safe while accepting life’s fundamental uncertainty.

You have agency. You have influence. You can set your direction and adjust your sails. But you can’t control the waves—and trying to do so exhausts you while preventing you from actually navigating skillfully.

Recognizing Your Control Strategies

We all have reflexive patterns we use to create a sense of safety when facing uncertainty. The two most common are:

Planning/Strategizing – Trying to map every contingency, research every possibility, or build elaborate “if-then” scenarios for situations that haven’t happened yet.

Performing/Role-Playing – Crafting a carefully managed version of yourself to produce a specific reaction or outcome from others.

These strategies feel productive. They feel like taking action. But here’s the paradox: they often don’t work, and sometimes they create the exact outcome you’re trying to avoid.

The Two Ironies of Control

Irony #1: Control strategies often simply don’t work.

Consider trying to plan for a difficult conversation with a friend about something that hurt your feelings. You script what you’ll say, anticipate their responses, prepare counterpoints. But the conversation never follows your script. They respond in ways you didn’t predict. Your carefully constructed plan becomes noise in your head while you’re trying to actually listen and connect.

The illusion of control gave you temporary relief from anxiety, but it didn’t actually give you control over the outcome.

Irony #2: Control strategies can create the outcome you’re trying to avoid.

Imagine you’re dating someone new and feeling insecure about whether they’re genuinely interested. To avoid rejection, you start performing—being extra agreeable, hiding your quirks, saying what you think they want to hear. Eventually, they lose interest or pull away. Why? Because they never met the real you. The person they’re walking away from is the performance, not you. Your strategy to avoid rejection manufactured an inauthentic connection that was destined to fail.

How to Sail on the Waves of Life: A Practice

Step 1: Notice when you’re reaching for control

Get familiar with your personal control tells:

• Do you feel urgency to plan or research before you can move forward?
• Are you rehearsing conversations or interactions in your head?
• Do you feel like you’re “on” or performing rather than just being?
• Are you trying to anticipate and prepare for every possible outcome?
• Do you feel like you can’t relax until you’ve “figured it out”?

Step 2: Name the fear underneath

Ask yourself: What am I afraid will happen if I don’t control this?

Common fears include:

• Being rejected or abandoned
• Looking foolish or incompetent
• Making the “wrong” choice and regretting it
• Being hurt or disappointed
• Missing an opportunity
• Discovering something painful about yourself or your situation

Step 3: Identify the safety you’re actually seeking

What would “safety” look like here? Get specific:

• Do you need to feel safe to be vulnerable in a conversation?
• Safe to make a decision without knowing how it will turn out?
• Safe to be your authentic self even if someone doesn’t like it?
• Safe to not have all the answers?
• Safe to be seen and potentially judged?
• Safe to enter into conflict even though it’s uncomfortable?

Step 4: Build genuine safety that honors reality

Here’s where the shift happens. Instead of building false safety through control, create real safety by:

Grounding in what you actually can control:

Sometimes you have influence over outcomes:

• “I can’t control whether they’ll like me, but I can control showing up as myself”
• “I can’t control the outcome of this decision, but I can control gathering the information I need to make the best choice I can today”
• “I can’t control their reaction, but I can control speaking my truth with kindness”

And sometimes you have no control over what happens at all—illness strikes, someone leaves, opportunities disappear, circumstances shift beyond your influence. In those moments, your control lies entirely in how you relate to what’s happening:

• “I can’t control this diagnosis, but I can control how I respond to it and what meaning I make from it”
• “I can’t control that they left, but I can control how I process this loss and what I learn about myself”
• “I can’t control this setback, but I can control what opportunities I look for within it”

Even when life deals you something you didn’t choose and couldn’t prevent, you always retain complete control over your inner experience and how you navigate what comes next. That’s not a small thing—it’s everything.

Preparing yourself to handle any outcome:

• “If they reject me, I’ll be sad, but I’ll be okay. I’ve survived rejection before”
• “If this doesn’t work out, I’ll adjust. I’m resourceful”
• “Whatever they say, I can handle hearing it”

Reframing “unwanted” outcomes as valuable information:

Even outcomes you wouldn’t prefer contain something useful. The key is recognizing that what feels like something being “done to you” is often actually information being revealed to you.

• A date where you show up authentically and get rejected isn’t “they rejected you”—it’s discovering early that this wasn’t a compatible match, saving you months or years of investing in something that wouldn’t work
• A job that doesn’t pan out isn’t “you failed”—it’s learning this role or company wasn’t the right fit before you committed to the wrong place
• A conflict with a partner isn’t something to avoid or smooth over—it’s an opportunity to understand each other’s true experience and build deeper connection. When you enter conflict authentically instead of managing it with control strategies (like performing calmness you don’t feel, or planning the “right” way to bring something up), you create the possibility for genuine closeness. The discomfort of conflict is temporary; the understanding and intimacy that comes from it is what you actually want

When you show up authentically, “bad” outcomes become efficient filters rather than personal failures. You’re not being rejected—you’re discovering incompatibility early. You’re not failing at conflict—you’re building real intimacy. That’s not something being done to you; that’s valuable information or deeper connection being created.

Practicing radical acceptance:

• “Whatever happens is what must be”
• “The outcome that emerges from my authentic self is the genuine outcome”
• “I can’t say the wrong thing to the right person”

Step 5: Redirect your energy to the present moment

Instead of living in a hypothetical future, bring yourself back:

• What can you appreciate about this moment?
• What sensations are you experiencing right now?
• What’s one small thing you can do to engage more fully with what’s in front of you?

Examples in Action

The job interview:

• Control approach: Obsessively research the company, script answers to every possible question, rehearse personality traits you think they want
• Sailing approach: Do reasonable preparation, then trust that the right fit will feel mutual. If you have to perform to get the job, you’ll have to keep performing to keep it. Show up as yourself and trust that “you can’t say the wrong thing to the right person”

The uncertain relationship:

• Control approach: Play it cool to avoid seeming too interested. Analyze every text. Try to be whoever you think they want
• Sailing approach: Be honest about your interest and needs. Show up authentically. If your genuine self isn’t what they’re looking for, that’s valuable information—not a failure

The big life decision:

• Control approach: Research endlessly, create spreadsheets, try to guarantee you’re making the “right” choice before you can move forward
• Sailing approach: Gather the information you reasonably can, acknowledge you can’t know how it will unfold, and trust your ability to adapt to whatever happens

The difficult conversation with a partner:

• Control approach: Avoid bringing up what’s bothering you, or carefully script how you’ll say it to avoid conflict
• Sailing approach: Speak your truth with kindness, knowing that while the conversation might be uncomfortable, it’s an opportunity to understand each other better and build deeper intimacy

The Promise of Sailing on the Waves of Life

When you stop trying to control outcomes and instead focus on being genuine in the present, something shifts. You might not get every outcome you prefer, but the outcomes you get are real. The connections are authentic. The paths forward are true to who you actually are.

And paradoxically, by releasing control, you often get better outcomes—because you’re not manufacturing artificial situations that collapse under their own weight.

The waves will always be unpredictable. That’s the nature of life. But you can learn to sail them with skill, intention, and grace. You have complete control over your sails—your choices, your authenticity, your inner experience. That’s where your true power lies.

You find true personal freedom not in controlling life, but in trusting yourself to navigate whatever life brings.